Page 28

“No.” I strode forward, gesturing for her to sit at a table under the shade. “Is that a problem?”

She took a chair and furrowed her brow. As she tucked a strand of those glossy black strands behind her ear, she opened her mouth like she wanted to say something.

“Is it a problem that you wouldn’t be reporting in to work?” Alexei demanded as he stood next to the table, crossing his arms.

She glanced at him, then Viktor. “I… I need the income. Who… are you?” She looked back and forth at them and settled on frowning at me.

“You don’t need to worry about who we are,” Alexei snapped. “We need to talk about who you are.”

Viktor groaned lightly. “I’m Viktor Volkov, Nikolai’s brother. He’s Alexei, our cousin.”

“Oh.” She swallowed, lowering her gaze. It didn’t escape my notice how rigid she was. Like this was an interview for a job and she knew she had to impress us but was too terrified to remember how to speak. “I’m… Louisa Emerson.” She forced another swallow. “Which I’m sure you know.”

“We know more than that.” Alexei set his hands on the back of a chair. “We know that you’ve erased video of a specific incident that occurred at one of your client’s properties.”

She shook her head instantly. “No. I didn’t.”

Alexei straightened and crossed his arms. “That’s not how we’ve heard it.”

She winced. “I’m not sure what you could’ve heard. Pickering Inc. Security has confidentiality policies and…” She looked at me again. “You aren’t cops, right?”

“Louisa, we’re leaders within the Volkov Bratva.” Viktor smiled, like he was amused.

She went pale. “The Bratva?” She licked her lips and looked ready to get up and run. “As in… the Mafia?”

I nodded. “Let’s start from the beginning. We’re interested in that portion of the surveillance footage.”

She focused on me. “I don’t know anything about it.”

Alexei huffed.

I arched one brow. “Want to try that again?”

She frowned. “I don’t. I saw it. The night that it was shown on the monitors, I was working on something else at the same time. I caught a glimpse of a car pulling up to a warehouse, and it was unusual, so I intended to flag it as suspicious activity to review later for my report at the end of my shift. But when I thought I was marking it to flag it, which would make a copy of that section, it wasn’t there. I guess I ended up deleting it. I commented on something glitching in that camera’s feed, like I put it in my nightly report, and that was it.”

“That was it?” I wasn’t convinced.

“That was it for that shift. Last night on my shift, I was double-checking the backed-up files on another server, and I noticed that the in-house database version had five minutes cut, but the copy that I thought I hadn’t ended up making was in the back-up folder. I only noticed because the views weren’t in sync.” She lowered her gaze again. “I was scared of what I saw, and…”

Her nervous state only worsened from there.

“And…?” Alexei prompted when she hesitated.

I turned to glare at him, wishing he’d shut the fuck up.

“And I wasn’t sure what to do. The missing minutes showed a car pulling up to a warehouse. Then two men appeared, carrying a body bag. A third man opened the trunk and tossed the body in it.” She winced. “I… I don’t know if a body was in it, but it looked like something long and heavy had been zipped in it. So I assumed. And I worried.”

“Why?” Alexei asked.

She frowned at him like it should be obvious. “Because there was a dead body in it. There had to be. Then I started worrying that I wasn’t supposed to see it. On top of how it glitched and the in-house database was missing those minutes, it was strange.”

“What did you do after you saw it?” I asked.

“Panicked.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know what to do. My boss is a jerk and he wouldn’t care about any concerns I have. I didn’t think I could call the cops because…” She cringed. “Because one of the men moving the body was a cop.”

I glanced at Alexei. “A cop?”

“He had a cop’s uniform on,” she said. “So I was scared that I was seeing something I shouldn’t and I was worried that I could be in trouble.”